Thats where you are wrong. Just talk to the few actual bitcoin merchants we have here, ask them how they feel about the insane price volatility. Its a huge burden on them and anyone who would want to implement bitcoins for any commerce. A more stable bitcoin value is not the only thing needed, but it would the most important step to pave the way for more widespread adoption. Now anyone looking in to bitcoin and looking at trade charts will be scared away, rightly thinking its not a trade facilitator, but a casino. A merchant cant risk 20% daily price volatility when his net margin is usually less than that.


I agree with you on that, because a merchant who is not interested in gambling can almost not do business in bitcoins. Fact is that extreme price volatility is a very big barrier to entry for other wannabee merchants who are not speculators. Price volatility also has another property: it attracts speculators. Catch 22.


I have no idea what you are trying to say here.

zhoutong, you seem in complete denial of the problems caused by excessive speculation.
the comparison with forex is somewhat flawed. Even if 70% of the currency trade would be speculative, in the world of our fiat currencies, there is an immense real economy underneath, and more importantly, we have a counter balance: central banks. As much as most people here despise them, at least they can and constantly do act to counter bubbles and busts created by speculation, by buying or selling foreign currencies and other means of dampening the volatility, thereby protecting their exports and trade from excessive price swings that speculators want and try to create.. At least it used to be that way, but speculation is becoming so rampant that even central banks are running out of ammunition and the result is not stability,its ever increasing instability. You have to be completely blind not to see this.

In bitcoin world its different, and in fact its infinitely worse; not only is the ratio between commerce and speculation pretty much zero, there is not even a central bank or any other mechanism to counter the volatility. There is no possibility to regulate and limit speculative positions or leverage. The results speak for themselves. Anyone who wants to make a case for financial regulation only has to point to the bitcoin experiment to prove their case. If our fiat currencies would see only a 1/100th the volatility that bitcoin sees, the impact on the real world economy would be nothing less than catastrophic.

Speculation is useful, no one argues against that, but only up to the point where its no longer predictive and guided by the underlying economy and its prospects, but instead guiding the economy and predicting itself. At that point, speculation becomes gambling and the first victim is commerce.

I wouldnt argue for isolating BTC if you can come up with a different way to keep speculation in check. There is a reason most countries have regulation that limits speculation, even the US, despite being ruled by bankers and speculators  just passed a law limiting at least individual speculative position in commodity markets. The reason is simple; excessive speculation kills the underlying economy by creating huge price swings.

In actual economies with functional governments, you can regulate or even impose taxes to try and reduce that problem. In bitcoin land, with its huge aversion of anything that even smells like government or regulation, let alone tax and because of its decentralized nature, I dont see a way. Ideally you would want to put a brake on fiat -> BTC -> fiat transactions that have no underlying economic activity, but how would you do that?

So its kind of ironic that government regulations and courts are (IMO) coming to the rescue by isolating bitcoin and thereby possibly allowing it a chance to grow. If nothing else, bitcoin is a great experiment, and one that should make hardcore libertarians think twice before claiming free markets can regulate themselves and intervention, regulation and taxation is always bad. Only bad regulation and stupid taxition is bad but if the commodity and real estates bubbles havent shown it to them yet, perhaps the bitcoin casino will make them reconsider some things.

There is a silver lining here though. If Mt Gox or someone else would decide (and manage) to raise the needed capital, now or whenever, to take this step, they will have to recover those costs from their customers. This could have the effect of a "tobin tax" putting a brake on excessive speculation if there is a, say 10% commission to be paid. And still it wouldnt completely disallow people from joining or leaving the bitcoin economy.

The only problem is of course that no one is going to pay 10% as long as there are other, unregulated markets that do it for almost nothing and you can rest assured the gamblers will just move to the caymans or wherever.

One more thing. Those two girls keep showing up everywhere. I dont know if they are your life partners (lucky you!), business partners or just hired looks, but if they do have a meaningful job at bitpay, then you should have them or her say so. Somehting like " Hi, I am Alison, and I am executive whatever at bitpay." It would be 10x more powerful for various reasons.

As a hired actress/voice over, she is frankly, not that good. But if she is an executive at the company, you would look completely different at her performance. In the same way no one would hire Steve Ballmer to do a commercial for anything, but if you know he is the CEO of microsoft, its different when he speaks (okay, not by much LOL).

Or you dont want to spend too much time (and therefore money) optimizing for what will be a low volume product. And more importantly, especially in a first batch you likely want extra test and measurement features. Regardless if 2 layers is theoretically possible, 6 aint unreasonable at all.


I dont think anyone ever said they use a spartan 6. I was just using that as a reference, I have no clue what they are using. Could you make an educated guess from that PCB and their claimed specs?

The "chick" is the person who did the voice over. I think it would have been more powerful if it ended with a video of her saying those last lines rather than a static picture though.

Other than that (oh and other than the fact that a good part of the video has become invalidated by the Mt Gox case in France heh..)  pretty good work!

4 layers is considered the minimum for a (single) spartan 6 PCB. 16+ layers is fairly common, a SP601 evaluation board has 16,  although that many is not likely needed for bitcoin because IO requirements are extremely low. 6 sounds about right to me, and its really not that expensive at all.

Of course that depends not on their business model, but completely on how much revenue they could generate. Such compliance likely isnt cheap and therefore this is a perfect illustration of my point: bitcoin simply isnt ready for this. The economy is way too small and we have way too many exchanges and other speculation tools (and too many speculators (ab)using them)  for what is mostly still a nonexisting economy.

Speculation is helpful if it helps predict, hedge and stabilize a real economy, its devastating when the speculation  becomes bigger than the economy itself, as speculation becomes about predicting speculation rather than the underlying economy. As a results its a casino with non stop bubbles and bursts with little or no relationship to any underlying fundamentals, and that is putting a great brake on bitcoin's acceptance as anything other than a casino chip.  Its a catch 22, because this extreme volatility attracts the gamblers.

If rulings such as these help turn back that clock and help to limit bitcoin's purpose again to being a tool to conduct trade, even if its just peer to peer trade of second hand goods, thats perfect for me. Let the economy grow, and only once its big enough to support these kinds of (regulated) financial service companies, then these companies can also serve a constructive role rather than providing the tools with which the fools destroy bitcoin.

Dont know. I dont remember there being a default naming convention but Ive never used it seriously myself. Ive only seen it used.

Anyway, there are plenty of such apps, and they all produce very similar looking 3D renderings. Note that this is no proof this thing is real, if I was going to make a fake, Id probably use such a tool to produce the fake images, but lets stop this absurdity and lets just wait for this board to materialize or not.

OMG! And the yellow ones are YELLOW! And there is a grey mesh! And look at the holes in the PCB, the perspective of the shadows dont match!

Newsflash: you are not looking at a photograph. You are looking at a 3D rendering from a pcb layout app. The chips are presented as simplified thin 3D grey rectangle boxes (whatever you call that in english), what you see are shadows. Its not made with a photorealistic rendering app, it looks exactly like a pcb123 design render. Id even bet 0.5 BTC its made with that very app.

What a great idea. Lets throw what little is left of our privacy under the bus. Why dont you lead by example. Care to start by publishing an ssh account so I can view all the information on your PC? Or just publish your wallet's private key? Gee maybe thats not such a good idea after all.

Oh while we're at it, lets publish launch codes of those nuclear missiles. Wouldnt hurt Im sure.

You'd rather see the names and addresses of everyone mentioned in every leak are revealed publicly, so that for instance, DEA informants could more easily be assassinated by drug cartels? You might change your mind if one day someone leaks phone, bank, credit card or whatever records that happen to also contain your personal data.

Its not only verifying information, they also try to clear the information, that is, find out what information could be dangerous to individuals and redact it where needed, either themselves, or in cooperation with government authorities (if they want to cooperate, which so far, has not been often). For leaks of the scope of what wikileaks regularly receives, thats a monumental task.

Then there is legal costs...

Anyway, Im not the greatest fan of Assange personally, but I do see wikileaks as a very good thing. We shouldnt need it if our media did their job of protecting sources and publishing important information regardless of what their governments want, but our media have turned in to spineless propaganda machines and comedy, so, donation sent.

Id like to qualify that statement; no traditional western bank. As I understand it, bitcoin seems rather compatible with islamic banking, and a a few small western non traditional interest free banks might be interested too. Like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAK_Members_Bank

Im sure there are similar institutions in many countries.

Exactly. It doesnt take a genius to figure out how he made those BTCs.
Cotton avenue.

Yep, looks better now, thanks.

A few more feature requests:
- show total shares per worker (ideally both for active block and globally)
- show average shares/s or per hour for each worker and for the account over the last 1 hour or day, or make that timespan selectable. This would be useful when finetuning performance, since current miners afaik dont provide this info.
- Allow changing or at least deleting of workers
- some 24hr revenue guestimate (preferably in $/euro/btc) by fetching prices from some exchange would be a nice touch.

This is no attack on bitcoin. This is a fairly logical and predictable consequence of operating financial service companies, which exchanges are.
The bitcoin aspect is still free as ever, the EURO part is not, it is regulated, and thats perfectly fine with me.

For those, who like me, think bitcoin should get a chance to become a currency, an actual trade facilitator, rather than a casino chip thats useless outside the casinos you call exchanges and bitcoinica, this is excellent news.  If you want bitcoins, start selling goods or services for bitcoins. If you want to get rid of your bitcoins, buy good or services with them. If you have no interest in either, then bitcoin isnt for you.

Threw ~10KH your way to give this a try. Seems to work fine so far. Just one small thing, in account details the workers "active" column is all set to "N", though they look pretty active from where I sit .

More likely a botnet. And that IMO is LTCs greatest flaw. A botnet could easily take it over.
At least for now, its much harder to take over a cryptocurrency running on GPU's; though that might change in 5 years or so if opencl capable IGPs become more common.